Victims of the Wall

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Erna Kelm

1908–1962

Erna Kelm, a 53-year-old woman from Sacrow who had worked in nursing and care, drowned in the Havel on 11 June 1962, apparently while trying to swim to West Berlin wearing a swimming belt beneath her clothes.

Black-and-white photograph of an older woman with glasses and curly hair behind glass in a rusted steel niche, her name engraved below
Portrait of Erna Kelm in the Window of Remembrance, Bernauer Strasse Photo: Brewer Bob, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Erna Kelm was born in Frankfurt (Oder) on 21 July 1908. In August 1947 she left Potsdam for Lübeck, without the permit then required by the occupying powers, and worked there as a nurse. From March 1948 she lived in West Berlin, where she was a nurse's assistant in a children's home for refugees. Her last post was as the head of a residential home.

Her children lived in Potsdam, and she travelled there several times to see them. Police records show that these trips made her suspected of intelligence work, though the suspicion was never confirmed. It reportedly led to her being questioned in November 1953, after which she went back to live in Potsdam; she said herself that she missed her children.

By 1962 she was living in Sacrow, which belonged to the East German district of Potsdam and faced the West Berlin district of Zehlendorf across the Havel; the border ran down the middle of the river. In the early hours of 11 June 1962, Whit Monday, an angler on the West Berlin bank of the river, south of Nikolskoe, saw a woman's body in the water and alerted the police, who brought it ashore by boat shortly afterwards.

Her East German identity card had been tucked into her sock. She had other papers with her in a plastic bag and wore a swimming belt under her clothing. Because of the swimming belt, West Berlin investigators concluded that she had in all likelihood been trying to swim across the Havel to the West, and the autopsy found that she had drowned.

At the request of relatives in Potsdam, her body was sent there, after which all trace of it was lost; for a long time nobody knew where she had been buried. The West Berlin investigation was soon closed and its file passed to the Central Registry Office in Salzgitter. When the case was reopened 30 years later, the original findings were upheld.

Apart from the Salzgitter files, her fate was recorded only in a few newspaper articles. On 13 June 1962 the West Berlin Tagesspiegel, reporting on incidents at the Wall over the Whitsun holiday, mentioned a woman's body taken from the lower Havel on Whit Monday who was thought to have drowned while fleeing. On the first anniversary of the Wall, the Federal Ministry of All-German Affairs included her death in a brochure on crimes at the border, and from then on her name appeared in official lists of those who died there. A photograph in the biography shows a commemorative column for her at the ferry dock in Sacrow.

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Also died on the outer ring between Berlin-Zehlendorf and Sacrow

Sources

This profile is a summary written for this site. Every fact in it is taken from source 1, which also gives the full account with archival references.

  1. Christine Brecht, “Erna Kelm”, biography in Chronik der Mauer, Federal Agency for Civic Education, Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam and Deutschlandradio. Accessed 23 September 2026. Read online. Basis for every fact in this profile, including the dates and place of death.
  2. German version of the same biography. Accessed 23 September 2026. Read online.
  3. Hans-Hermann Hertle and Maria Nooke (eds.), The Victims at the Berlin Wall, 1961–1989: A Biographical Handbook. Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam and Berlin Wall Foundation, Berlin 2011. The printed handbook from which the online biography is taken.
  4. Hans-Hermann Hertle and Maria Nooke, “140 Victims at the Berlin Wall, 1961–1989” (list), Centre for Contemporary History Potsdam and Berlin Wall Foundation, August 2017. PDF. Used to cross-check names and dates.
  5. Hans-Hermann Hertle and Maria Nooke, “The Victims at the Berlin Wall, 1961–1989: Findings of a Research Project”, August 2017. PDF. Source of the classification into escapees, people with no intent to escape, and border soldiers.

Further reading

Image credits

Cite this page

“Erna Kelm”, Victims of the Berlin Wall, Berlin Experiences. https://victimsofthewall.com/victims/kelm-erna/

Map

The pin position is based on the place of death described in source 1. Base map © OpenStreetMap contributors; course of the Wall in 1989 from Geoportal Berlin (dl-de/zero-2.0). Accessed 23 September 2026.